Since Donald Trump left office in January 2021, there has been no more influential presentation of his theory that the election was stolen than the film “2000 Mules,” created by activist — and Trump pardon recipient — Dinesh D’Souza.
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D’Souza’s movie was a masterpiece of meeting market demand. There was a nationwide scramble by red-hat-wearing enthusiasts to prove that Joe Biden cheated his way into the White House, a rush for evidence that made mini-celebrities of people like MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell. And into this bedlam strode D’Souza. He held in his hand data cobbled together by a right-wing activist group called True the Vote that he claimed showed thousands of people collecting and submitting fraudulent ballots in swing states.
It was exactly what Trumpworld was looking for. It was exactly what Trump was looking for. When he was asked in May if he was ready to admit that he had lost the election, the first words out of his mouth centered on the film’s claims.
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“If you look at True the Vote,” he said, “they found millions of votes on camera, on government cameras, where they were stuffing ballot boxes.”
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The only problem, of course, was that it was all nonsense. It was immediately apparent nonsense, certainly, and not only because a national ring of thousands of people would have had to somehow go undetected, but because — even after the movie came out — the alleged caper yielded no arrests. It was also obviously nonsense because True the Vote’s data couldn’t do what the group claimed it did.
Back in 2021, True the Vote contacted the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) about its allegations. Specifically, the purported vote-monitoring organization claimed to have cellphone geolocation evidence showing that hundreds of people had traveled to multiple ballot drop boxes on given days. This, the Texas-based group insisted, proved that there was an operation focused on depositing ballots in those drop boxes, something that it claimed was bolstered by a whistleblower who admitted to being part of this operation.
By September 2021, the GBI had rejected the claim, in part because True the Vote had declined to put investigators in contact with the alleged whistleblower. That notwithstanding, the data collected by True the Vote — using not GPS data but less-precise cell-tower positioning — showed nothing more than people traveling within 100 feet of drop box locations. (You can see examples of True the Vote maps created from Wisconsin data; there is no obvious targeting of any drop box site displayed.) The GBI declared the accusation “curious,” but took it no further.
It didn’t end there, however. Georgia officials, who had been under relentless attack in the wake of the 2020 election, demanded that True the Vote turn over whatever evidence or information about informants it had, eventually obtaining a court order for the group to do so. This week, the group’s attorneys responded: There was no such evidence to share.
This is not the first time that True the Vote has been caught flat-footed. Officials in Arizona recommended that the group be investigated by the FBI and IRS (given its tax-exempt status) for failing to provide evidence it claimed to have about ballot-stuffing in that state. True the Vote itself promised for months that it would release its data publicly to validate the claims made in “2000 Mules.” It never did.
Again, this is not surprising. The film features True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht and investigator Gregg Phillips prominently and repeatedly, allowing them to allege that they had uncovered this network of ballot harvesters. But Phillips had already burned his credibility on vote-fraud allegations after the 2016 election, when he claimed to have found millions of illegal ballots. (Trump elevated this claim, too.) No such evidence was ever presented, obviously.
D’Souza’s argument depends entirely on True the Vote’s data, as he explained when we spoke in 2022. Much of it was immediately disproved, like the scene in the film where Phillips and Engelbrecht intimate that they had used cellphone location data to solve a murder that, it turns out, had already been solved. The movie relies heavily on video taped at ballot boxes, with Phillips and Engelbrecht providing voice-over commentary to suggest that something shady is going on. But at no point do they show a person at a ballot box matched to geolocation data, the purported evidence on which their allegations rest. In fact, only one map of an alleged ballot harvester’s path is shown in the film. In an email to The Washington Post, Phillips admitted that it was artificial.
In my conversation with D’Souza, I asked him about a scene in which the True the Vote team alleges that someone depositing a ballot in a drop box is taking a photo because it was demanded by his criminal handlers.
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“We have this assertion being made by Gregg Phillips about what is happening with this picture being taken,” I noted. “You are saying — and, actually, you haven’t actually said yet — that this came from the whistleblower. Did the whistleblower say that they were paid only if they took photos of the ballots?”
“No, I don’t know that,” D’Souza replied. “I don’t know that because I haven’t talked to the whistleblower. The whistleblower spoke to True the Vote investigators. So I have to admit that my information from that comes from True the Vote and also from the Georgia reports, which I’ve read.”
This is the information that True the Vote now admits it doesn’t have.
There are numerous other flaws in the movie. There is one last point, though, that is worth highlighting.
I also asked D’Souza how he came up with the estimates of how many purportedly fraudulent ballots had been submitted. This is the crux of the film: At one point, D’Souza (as narrator) counts up enough illegally harvested ballots to have flipped several swing states. It delivers his audience exactly what they have come for, proof that the election was stolen. But with limited video surveillance, I asked, where did those numbers come from?
The “investigators could tell,” D’Souza assured me. “There actually is a way to know that, but it does require a pretty sophisticated ability to look more closely at video that is shown very broadly in the screen.”
Don’t hold your breath for True the Vote providing that evidence.
Cut through the 2024 election noise. Get The Campaign Moment newsletter.
D’Souza’s movie was a masterpiece of meeting market demand. There was a nationwide scramble by red-hat-wearing enthusiasts to prove that Joe Biden cheated his way into the White House, a rush for evidence that made mini-celebrities of people like MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell. And into this bedlam strode D’Souza. He held in his hand data cobbled together by a right-wing activist group called True the Vote that he claimed showed thousands of people collecting and submitting fraudulent ballots in swing states.
It was exactly what Trumpworld was looking for. It was exactly what Trump was looking for. When he was asked in May if he was ready to admit that he had lost the election, the first words out of his mouth centered on the film’s claims.
ADVERTISING
“If you look at True the Vote,” he said, “they found millions of votes on camera, on government cameras, where they were stuffing ballot boxes.”
Sign up for How To Read This Chart, a weekly data newsletter from Philip Bump
The only problem, of course, was that it was all nonsense. It was immediately apparent nonsense, certainly, and not only because a national ring of thousands of people would have had to somehow go undetected, but because — even after the movie came out — the alleged caper yielded no arrests. It was also obviously nonsense because True the Vote’s data couldn’t do what the group claimed it did.
Back in 2021, True the Vote contacted the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) about its allegations. Specifically, the purported vote-monitoring organization claimed to have cellphone geolocation evidence showing that hundreds of people had traveled to multiple ballot drop boxes on given days. This, the Texas-based group insisted, proved that there was an operation focused on depositing ballots in those drop boxes, something that it claimed was bolstered by a whistleblower who admitted to being part of this operation.
By September 2021, the GBI had rejected the claim, in part because True the Vote had declined to put investigators in contact with the alleged whistleblower. That notwithstanding, the data collected by True the Vote — using not GPS data but less-precise cell-tower positioning — showed nothing more than people traveling within 100 feet of drop box locations. (You can see examples of True the Vote maps created from Wisconsin data; there is no obvious targeting of any drop box site displayed.) The GBI declared the accusation “curious,” but took it no further.
It didn’t end there, however. Georgia officials, who had been under relentless attack in the wake of the 2020 election, demanded that True the Vote turn over whatever evidence or information about informants it had, eventually obtaining a court order for the group to do so. This week, the group’s attorneys responded: There was no such evidence to share.
This is not the first time that True the Vote has been caught flat-footed. Officials in Arizona recommended that the group be investigated by the FBI and IRS (given its tax-exempt status) for failing to provide evidence it claimed to have about ballot-stuffing in that state. True the Vote itself promised for months that it would release its data publicly to validate the claims made in “2000 Mules.” It never did.
Again, this is not surprising. The film features True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht and investigator Gregg Phillips prominently and repeatedly, allowing them to allege that they had uncovered this network of ballot harvesters. But Phillips had already burned his credibility on vote-fraud allegations after the 2016 election, when he claimed to have found millions of illegal ballots. (Trump elevated this claim, too.) No such evidence was ever presented, obviously.
D’Souza’s argument depends entirely on True the Vote’s data, as he explained when we spoke in 2022. Much of it was immediately disproved, like the scene in the film where Phillips and Engelbrecht intimate that they had used cellphone location data to solve a murder that, it turns out, had already been solved. The movie relies heavily on video taped at ballot boxes, with Phillips and Engelbrecht providing voice-over commentary to suggest that something shady is going on. But at no point do they show a person at a ballot box matched to geolocation data, the purported evidence on which their allegations rest. In fact, only one map of an alleged ballot harvester’s path is shown in the film. In an email to The Washington Post, Phillips admitted that it was artificial.
In my conversation with D’Souza, I asked him about a scene in which the True the Vote team alleges that someone depositing a ballot in a drop box is taking a photo because it was demanded by his criminal handlers.
ADVERTISING
“We have this assertion being made by Gregg Phillips about what is happening with this picture being taken,” I noted. “You are saying — and, actually, you haven’t actually said yet — that this came from the whistleblower. Did the whistleblower say that they were paid only if they took photos of the ballots?”
“No, I don’t know that,” D’Souza replied. “I don’t know that because I haven’t talked to the whistleblower. The whistleblower spoke to True the Vote investigators. So I have to admit that my information from that comes from True the Vote and also from the Georgia reports, which I’ve read.”
This is the information that True the Vote now admits it doesn’t have.
There are numerous other flaws in the movie. There is one last point, though, that is worth highlighting.
I also asked D’Souza how he came up with the estimates of how many purportedly fraudulent ballots had been submitted. This is the crux of the film: At one point, D’Souza (as narrator) counts up enough illegally harvested ballots to have flipped several swing states. It delivers his audience exactly what they have come for, proof that the election was stolen. But with limited video surveillance, I asked, where did those numbers come from?
The “investigators could tell,” D’Souza assured me. “There actually is a way to know that, but it does require a pretty sophisticated ability to look more closely at video that is shown very broadly in the screen.”
Don’t hold your breath for True the Vote providing that evidence.
